quinta-feira, 21 de dezembro de 2017

Guess what's the book about? Hell to you if you don't figure out. It's was written by renowed music critic Rui Eduardo Paes (or REP, his friendly acronym) and designed and illustrated by various Chili Com Carne artists: Bráulio Amado, Astromanta, Hetamoé, Joana Estrela, Joana PiresandRudolfo. Fantastic dildoistic cover was done by Spanish artist Carles G.O.D.The Queercore became empty in recent years, despite the existence of new freedom grants, despite the signs that the hecatomb of capitalism can happen and despite the nomadism of the sexes. Loads of very good and provocative Art was produced in the impulse to stick your fingers in warm and moisty places, but was it enough? The Hardcore Queer still exists, it resists because it's on the defensive and because it's weak. Like it's been genetically programmed to fail. Still, when we hear a shrill feedback of the Apostles or the Nervous Gender everything, absolutely everything, seems possible ... Let's believe on that, okay?About the author:

Rui Eduardo Paes is a rare example of something rare: a journalist whose work is as essential and informative as it is well-researched and passionate. - Dan Warburton (Wire, Paris Transatlantic)

Music critic and writer free-lancer. Chief-editor of the jazz and improvised music online magazine JAZZ.PT, after six years of editions in paper. Artistic director of the festival Jazz no Parque, produced by Serralves Foundation. Author of nine books about music mixed with multimedia, politics and queer theory. Collaborative work with Culturgest and the recording labels Clean Feed and Shhpuma. Co-founder, with Carlos "Zíngaro", of the artists association Granular, and member of its direction for 11 years, until 2013. Co-founder of the Ernesto de Sousa Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation / Luso-American Foundation / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and member of its permanent jury for 20 years, until the last edition in 2013. Former assessor of the ACARTE Service / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's board of directors.

This is the first chapter, "Searching for the “core” in queercore", translated in English:

Dear Johnny Depp,

I hope this finds you
well. It’s me, Brad, your greatest fan writing you again to say hello.

Well, it’s been a
crazy, crazy few weeks. I guess the big thing is I finally made it out east to
New York. Boy, that place sure is insane. The journey there was a trip. It took
over two days on Greyhound bus to get there. Sleeping and eating was impossible
so the only way to get through it was nibble on a little baggie of meth, listen
to bootlegs of your band ‘P’(man, you guys were under-rated – get the band back
together, dude!) and jerk off a bunch of times.

Fortunately it turns
out that most people who travel on Greyhounds are deviants so I got some help.
I jerked off a couple of guys at once in the cubicle, which was a tight
squeeze, but we managed and I had them cum on my face and in my ear, and I also
got fucked in the ass by a real-life genuine native American Indian who had all
this long ratty hair, real gnarly, a little like yours in ‘Pirates Of The
Caribbean’, on the back seat at about 5am somewhere near Pensacola. His dick
was big, but not too big and I was grateful for the distraction. Also, he never
said a word to me, except for when he came he whispered “Krispy Kreme” in my
ear, which was weird, but not that weird I guess. I don’t know, maybe it is
weird. Or maybe it’s a cultural thing. This being my first trip outside of
Lubbock, Texas I couldn’t really say.

So anyway, when I
finally arrived in NYC I felt like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, only instead
of Toto I had a bag containing meth, weed and some lube. A quick bit of glory
hole dick-sucking in Port Authority (where I tasted my first black cock – a lot
like white cock) and I was on my way. I found a bar and got a little drunk on
beer. I guess maybe I got spiked or something, because the next thing I
remember is waking up in some street with my asshole itchy and bleeding, but
with more money in my pocket than I started. Weird, huh? Hey, maybe people in
New York aren’t as bad as they say. I sat there smoking a cigarette and the
street signs told me I was in Brooklyn. Crazy.

I came to this other
bar with posters in the window advertising a band that playing there and they
were called – this is so weird – ‘GAY FOR JOHNNY DEPP’!!! It was like a sign
from God or something so I paid the $5 fee and went in.

Inside there were all
these kids jumping around with no shirts on, and just looking at all those
writhing torsos got me so hot I just had to gorge myself on a nice greasy
crank, which I did in the toilets. It was attached to some punker kid in a
Fallout Boy T-shirt – hot! After he came in mouth he called me a fag and
punched me in the face, which was also hot. His cum tasted like Dr. Pepper, so
he was probably straight edge. Back in the bar I got a proper look at ‘GAY FOR
JOHNNY DEPP’, who were actually four guys with guitars and shit, each of them
pretty hot in their own way, though not as hot you, Johnny. Sometimes I can cum
just looking at pictures of you, Johnny. I don’t even have to touch my dick.

Anyways. The more
songs they played, the wilder the crowd got. When the singer guy took off of
most of his clothes and jumped into the crowd I tried to get my tongue up his
ass but he was too quick for me. They’re a really fierce band though and I’d happily
blow them all for free. I guess I’d describe them as ‘hardcore’ and I bought a
copy of their debut full-length CD ‘THE POLITICS OF CRUELTY’ on the way out.

Afterwards reeling out
into the street, drunk and high, I bumped into a squadron of marines just back
from Iraq, who took me back to their YMCA and took turns rimming, fucking and
bashing me. At one point two of them tried to get both their dicks in my ass at
once, while another skull-fucked me, and I jerked off two more. A sixth guy
just stood there, drinking a can of Bud and filming it.

The weird thing was I
hadn’t been to the bath-room all day – apart from to suck dick – so a couple of
them ended up with all this runny shit on their cocks, which they weren’t
pleased about, so they made me lick it off while they made out with each other.
I guess this went on for about four hours, until I was covered in bruises and
crusted US military jizzum which fell off me like snowflakes when I finally
limped out into the dawn light feeling tired but pretty good. After a big
breakfast at a Denny’s I had a little more meth, took a cab back to the
station, blew the driver in some side-street, had a couple more cocks in the
toilets then got on the bus for an uneventful 48 hour trip back, the boredom
punctuated only by a few bouts of mutual masturbation with this guy and his son
and eating the ass of a truck driver at a station somewhere in Tennessee. I
belched cum and asshole all the way home.

I don’t know what
happened to that CD I bought.

Anyway, that’s all for
now, Johnny. I enclose a pair of my jockeys and some more Polaroid pictures of
my dick and spread ass cheeks. Good luck with your next movie. Write me
sometime.

Your friend,

Bradley

The letter above was not a genuine letter but
rather the press release from a hardcore band from New York published in 2004 along
with the “Erotically Charged Dance Songs for the Desperate” EP. The guitarist
Sid Jagger (Joseph Grillo) and the vocalist Marty Leopard (Arty Shepherd) were
the main mentors of this project inspired on a homo-erotic obsession for the actor
Johnny Depp. This fixation resulted in lyrics such as «Cos I want my Johnny
bleeding, fuck him in the ass», sung in a high pitched voice and against the
backdrop of a wall of punk-metal distortion. Their first full-length album
would come out in 2007 entitled “The Politics of Cruelty”.

Promotional copies of the record were sent out
to the media along with the supposed letter to Depp. Beforehand, the
journalists had taken receipt of other promotional materials including condoms,
gay erotic photographs, rubber gloves and bottles of amyl nitrate. In 2008, Gay
For Johnny Depp made an United Kingdom tour in which they took to the stage
wearing only a sock hung on their genitalia. They brought an end to the band in
2011 following the release of the album “What Doesn’t Kill You, Eventually
Kills You”. A prophetic title undoubtedly…

The group in question was one of the few
labelled queercore that, in more recent years, still justified the core part of this trend’s name. From the
1990s, at the peak of the queer-anarchist front to hardcore, through to
contemporary times, the movement allowed itself to become contaminated by pop and
by dance music. In many cases, this evolution was accompanied by the depoliticisation
of the postures and the discourses even if with some important and notable
exceptions. As a general rule, the radicalism of the beginnings faded with
clear cases of accommodation and, if you can imagine it, even
bourgeoisification. Fame and the accompanying money corrupt music and this
proves just as true in the alternative and do-it-yourself fields. As G.B.
Jones, perhaps the greatest anarcho-queer reference, stated, «rock was once
rebel music but it has now become establishment».

Nevertheless, the still hardcore faction of queercore
still remains certainly alive and very resistant. What we need to do is to
search and separate the wheat from the chaff. Easy to find are examples such as
Limp Wrist – information about them even appears in Portuguese due to their legions
of followers in Brazil. The band is made up of four middle aged men with beer
bellies and would be confused with bikers if their hands, precisely their
hands, did not stretch out in such a way as any other faggot with self-respect.
They play in leather and underwear, exploiting their daddy-like appearances in
an environment that is above all youthful. Scott Moore, the guitarist, is very
clear about the position that they place themselves in: «I am not some
irritating gay, I am an aberration. I do not have the slightest interest in
belonging to the world of the right-doers.» Limp Wrist transformed themselves
into a symbol of punk purity in a scene that seems otherwise to have prostituted
itself.

The group was founded in 1998 by musicians from
different cities across the United States and who had already played in bands
such as Los Crudos or Devoid of Faith. Their song “I Love Hardcore Boys, I Love
Boys Hardcore” soon became a hymn for the queer cause. Martin Sorrondeguy, the vocalist,
is also a cinema director and was the editor of a zine, Maximum Rock N Roll, thus continuing the tradition of this musical
current getting involved in writing and social and political reflection. He has
inclusively also become the spokesperson for queer Latinos who in Amérikkka experience
the dual oppression of being sexual “deviants”, as Brad would say in the fake
letter to Johnny Depp, and Hispanic in a highly racist society.

It is undeniable that Limp Wrist lack the affirmative
character of the pro-socialist texts of Gary Floyd and the Dicks. A sign of the
time perhaps. An awful lot of water has passed since they launched the single
“Dicks Hate the Police” in the already far off year of 1980, with the Berlin
Wall still standing and Perestroika yet to deliver Russia to capitalism and the
nationalist right of Putin rather than achieving the old aspiration of Stateless
communism. However, without the Dicks, without Floyd inviting the public to
play with his penis against an explosive bed of guitar feedback, there would
have been no Limp Wrist. These have, in fact, a song dedicated to Floyd and the
other pioneers of queercore such as Randy Turner of the Big Boys and Joshua
Plague of the Mukitteo Fairies – “Ode”.

There would also similarly have been no Dead
Betties with their intense, even violent, music and their lyrics blowing away
all the social mainstream norms ever since they were launched in Brooklyn in 2001
and taking their message out to emblematic venues such as CBGB and Knitting
Factory, emerging out of niches at festivals such as Homo-a-Gogo and the LGBTQ
Pride demonstrations. They have been portrayed as a queer version of Sonic
Youth, due to the influence that the first, more punk phase of the now extinct
group of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon had on the bass player and androgynous vocalist
Joshua “Starr” Ackley.

Without the Dicks, there would also have been
no Nü Sensae, a Canadian
project founded in 2008 by Andrea Lukic and Daniel Pitout, the latter a known activist
in the fight against AIDS and, according to one critic, «the cutest person on
the planet». They gained in profile with their brutalist rock, practically noise,
album “TV, Death and the Devil” and published a monthly newsletter printed typographically
and sent out not by e-mail but rather in the old fashioned means used by extreme-left
organisations: by mail. We would note that queercore was effectively born in Canada
and along with another descendant of the Dicks, the Shearing Pinx of Vancouver.

The frontmen, Nic Hughes and Jeremy Van Wyck, picked
up the hardcore essentialism and made it experimental, forging that which has
come to be called “weird punk”. The Shearing Pinx recorded their improvisations
in a jam style approach before sticking pieces of one and another together until
they either had a theme or that they thought «lasted long enough», as the bass
player Van Wyck explained. This was just what they did in collaborations with Nü Sensae and
other bands with elucidative names such as U.S. Girls or AIDS Wolf, on the grounds
of seeking to «interact with the community». There are occasions when they seem
to display all the dissonance of industrial rock with others when they more
closely approximate sludge-metal. «I’m not a violent guy» – said Hughes. «What’s
happening is that this city is so very, very, very heavy, all the time and in
such an extreme way, that we have to discharge all of this bad energy.»

With an even greater strength of reason, this
is all that happens with the New Yorkers God is My Co-Pilot. This group, with
its variable composition fronted by a bisexual couple, Sharon Topper and Craig
Flanagin, managed to interweave the primary nature of punk with the shorn down
sound of some free jazz, calling on partners including the saxophonist John
Zorn and the guitarist Elliott Sharp, among others. «We are associating rock, a
sexist language, with other musical styles, to better deal with the identity of
the genre within the scope of its own terms of complexity», Topper clarified as
regards the motivations behind the songs that, as a general rule, last less
than three minutes. They very frequently take sex as their theme, whether the
celebration of fist-fucking in “List”, lesbianism in “They Often Look Fr.” or moral
patterns of behaviour in “Sex is for Making Babies”. There are no major “political”
considerations coming out of their vocals – the anarchism of God is My Co-Pilot
proves implicit. This, for example, involves Sharon’s usage of a vibrator to
play the guitar strings.

More difficult to ascertain is whether the She
Devils, from Argentina, and active ever since 1995, had any type of influence
over queercore in the northern hemisphere, especially as the United States had
thus far been well served by projects exclusively made up of women. Patricia
Pietrafiesa, the lead member of the group, also got involved in the fanzine
movement with the publication of Resistencia
but this was written in Spanish and very probably did not reach any Hispanic
readers in the empire of the stars and stripes. What we may be sure of is that
their virulent punk led to the appearance of a band with the same name in Springfield,
Illinois, with the latter less primary in their approach (their dark ambiences
have already been compared to the Melvins) and worthy of the designation cuntcore.
The themes of the original She Devils span feminism, homosexual rights, ecology
and do-it-yourself. They engaged in the campaign to legalise abortion in their
country with a record splitwith the Fun
People entitled “El Aborto Ilegal Asesina my Libertad” and functioning as the
front line for a wave of political-cultural agitation with the organisation of
the Belladona Festival, open to female artists from whatever their respective
field.

Far better known are Tribe 8, descendants via
Leslie Mah of the old-school punk band Anti-Scrunti Faction. The connection was
duly recognised by Tribe 8 when they made a version of the song “Slave to my
Estrogen”, by Anti-Scrunti, called “Estrofemme” in 1998. In any case, there is
the pioneering work of the also well known ASF who got certified in queercore with
their mention in the fanzine J.D.s, which
had originally launched this entire movement. Formed in San Francisco, the
group Tribe 8 sought with this name not only to restore the English expression
that had once been used to refer to women who like women, “tribade”, but also
alluding to how queers also constitute a tribe, whether for the good or for the
bad.

Even more so than Leslie Mah, taking a leading
role in this collective was the vocalist Lynn Breedlove, a FTM (female-to-male)
who performed in concert with breasts on display (and still having them today) and
wearing a strap-on that would get offered from mouth to mouth of the audience members
closest to the stage. The controversy generated did not end there: their songs
dealt with issues such as sadomasochism, its attitude was a challenge to feminist
and lesbian orthodoxies and on stage commonly simulated the castration of a
rubber penis during the playing of a song about rape, “Gang Castrate”. When
accused of inciting violence by event producers and women’s organisations who
attempted to boycott their live performances, Breedlove declared, straightly
and bluntly, that the use of force is always acceptable whenever somebody is being
raped and so much the better if the perpetrator ends up dead.

«For us, to jump from one side to the other, screaming
and brandishing knives makes us feel better. We are survivors of sexual abuse
and censorship is always repression irrespective of however you justify it. If
you don’t like my art, don’t look for it. What I would do if forced to match
your concepts of art would no longer be art, no longer the expression of my
life and my experiences. Whenever they censor some Tribe 8 record or they stick
on those ‘parents advisory’ labels what I tell the kids is “they won’t sell you
the record? Then steal it and steal a few beers to listen to it with”», commented
the vocalist.

Breedlove believes that the censors seeking to
stop Tribe 8 had the goal of avoiding the unavoidable: «They know that the kids
are increasingly listening to more alternative music, that they are the future
and that the future is revolution. It’s the same shit that has happened with rock‘n’roll
ever since Elvis Presley. It’s revolution that they are scared of and one of
these days censorship is going to take root in our homes. When that happens,
it’ll be too late. But it’s a revolution that we are making, in the anarchist fashion,
underground. “Do-it-yourself” is the key. We cannot accept any “help” from
publishers and the media controlled by money and power on the risk of diluting
what we have to say. This would overthrow our revolutionary objectives. We need
to continue working in our network where we pass on our information and not
them.»

Lynn Breedlove continued with this activity
after Tribe 8 broke up. He published a book, “Godspeed”, performed in various
films, including the one he himself produced, “Estrofemme”, and “The Yo-Yo
Gang” by G.B. Jones and “Shut Up White Boy” by Vu T. and Thu Ha, and also
starred in spectacles such as “Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show” and “Man with
a Vagina”. Furthermore, he has collaborated with United Genders of the
Universe, organising support and education for transgender persons in the Bay
Area as well as anti-racist initiatives and campaigning for stronger worker
rights.

Only the female band Fifth Column, from Canada,
had a greater impact than Tribe 8. The name refers to a strategy deployed by Franco
in the Spanish Civil War: the fascist fifth column operated inside republican Madrid,
pretending to be by their side until attacking their troops with the element of
surprise. Their first EP was launched in 1982, with the title “Boy/Girl –
Monsieur Beauchamp”. Despite their hardcore affiliation, they also feature an arty
facet: for example, their concerts include the showing of films, instruments relatively
uncommon in rock such as saxophones, trumpets, flutes or violins, as well as a go-go
dancer, Bruce LaBruce, who was himself one of those responsible for the boom of
queer fanzines. Inspired by the International Situationist and by Guy Débord, the
author of “The Society of Spectacle”, Fifth Column took an ironic stance and
made recourse to cutting sarcasm as in “All Women Are Bitches”, from 1992.

The cineaste and fanzine editor G.B. Jones was
one of the driving forces of the project alongside Caroline Azar. At the
beginning of the 1980s, the existence of a band exclusively made up of women
was still perceived with surprise despite the prior existence in punk of groups
such as The Slits, The Raincoats and X-Ray Spex. And, naturally, the rumour
swiftly spread that Fifth Column hated men. But no: they simply preferred women.
Of course, the discourse of Jones went down a storm with the unpopular girls in
high school: «When I was going through that, there in school were only stupid,
ugly and talentless people who would grab at the only opportunity that they
would ever get to convince someone to pay them some attention. Idiot girls that
would become cheerleaders on their way to marrying, having children, mortgages,
accounts, parents-in-law screaming at them, a job and then death. These were
the best years in their lives and the worst in mine. We get many letters and
phone calls from kids saying that, when they listen to us they feel good as
they are not alone. I’m not saying that we raise the awareness of these adolescents
because that would be pretentious, but it’s just as well there is somebody
awake.»

Fifth Column strove to act as a collective
resistance. «We resist the standards, the status quo, whatever is considered
normal», specifies G.B. Jones. What proves curious is that this group emerges
well before the rrriot girl wave and before Bikini Kill and the Indigo Girls. When
there was still no feminist rock, when queer theory had still not taken root in
universities, when there was still no perception that the gay movement was «assimilationist
and bourgeois», there was already a queercore band. Hence, more than mere resistance,
the Fifth Column were precursors. It was they, along with the zine J.D.s (J.D. as in Juvenile Delinquents,
James Dean and J.D. Salinger), who created the scene. Everything else the scene
created.

And in what way did they create that which came
to happen? With the power arising from songs such as “The Fairview Mall Story”,
an aggressive attack on justice and the media in the wake of a sad story of
homophobia in the particularly difficult 1980s. 32 men were arrested for sexual
acts in the bathrooms of a shopping mall in Canada, the Fairview Mall in St.
Catharine’s and their names were leaked and published by the newspapers. One of
them, married and with children, could not stand the scandal and committed
suicide.

Other pioneers included Team Dresch with Donna
Dresch, Jody Bleyle and Kaja Wilson, headquartered in Portland. The group’s gigs
featured the particularity of including personal defence tactics sessions given
by the instructor Alice Stagg, showing how to prevent attacks by rapists,
jealous boyfriends and police officers suffering authority abuse syndrome. The
collective launched in 1993 with the single “Hand Grenade” and then with the
album “Personal Best”, even if they were not to see out the end of the decade. Nevertheless,
they left behind an enormous influence on those who followed, which hardly
comes as any surprise when knowing that Dresch had the very best of pedigrees
in alternative American rock – previously playing with the legendary Dinosaur
Jr. of J. Mascis.

One heir to all of the ground breaking work was
undoubtedly Jane Danger, vocalist and guitarist of Three Dollar Bill, a name
drawing on the American expression “queer as a three dollar bill”. This holding
despite the Chicago band also including male musicians beginning with the other
vocalist and guitarist, Chris Piss. Everything kicked off in the late 1990s and
one of the group’s initial acts was to participate in the first Gay Shame, the 1998
alternative festival / march to Gay Pride that queer militants accuse of having
sold out to political and economic interests, through taking receipt of
financial support from companies interested in homosexual purchasing power and
sponsored by city councils desiring to appear “progressive”.

As Jane states: «I always preferred hard rock and
punk to any other type of music because they’re a very healthy and aggressive way
of discharging energy and emotion. I even think that the rage of punk fits in
with the emotions of the gay community and that it is a good way to connect
with other men and our struggle for equal rights.» Furthermore, the song in the
style of question-and-answer, “Parody of Pleasure” (2005), comes directly from
a heterosexual punk group of the 1970s, the X.

While the homo-queer hardcore of Three Dollar
Bill contains a melodic, almost pop side, the trans-queer hardcore of the New
Yorkers Schmekel (“little penis” in Yiddish) displays a folk facet that also
draws upon the importance of melody. This is a male quartet that were designated
women at birth with the particularity of them all being Jews – the music
follows the scales of the klezmer – and socialists, following principles of
equality within the organisation of the band. The lyrics sung by Lucian Kahn would
recall Frank Zappa intermixed with Mel Brooks and Groucho Marx were they not
macho pigs. A good example is “Gay Shame”, which is partially reproduced below…

«You did what the HRC said you should / So gay yuppiesand white old dudes / Can take over
working class neighbourhoods / And buy organic groceries at Whole Foods. / Congratulations
to the married men / And the runaway queers earing your hors devours. / I’m
sure you invited them to the party / ‘Cuz we all know who “equality” serves. / GAY
SHAME GAY SHAME GAY SHAME / GEH HEIM GEH HEIM GEH HEIM. / You say feminists are
Delilah to your Samson / Busting your balls like a condom of lambskin. / Trans
boy buddies, you say you’ve got a passel / But trans girls have elected you
National Asshole. / You see me fully clothed and you’re scared of my man cunt /
But there’s pictures of your nutsack on Grindr and Manhunt / Say you’re not sexist,
just regular homo / If vaginas remind you of the whale that ate Jonah. / GAY
SHAME GAY SHAME GAY SHAME / GEH HEIM GEH HEIM GEH HEIM. (…)»

Moving away from the punk core but still within
its boundaries, there is also the Pariah Piranha of Andrea Shearer, a trio with
two dykes and a hetero-queer who confesses an «incapacity to stick to any
single tendency in rock», and the Gloryholes with their attraction to the “garage‘n’roll”
sound and with a drummer answering to the name of Johnny Machine as well as a Holger
Czukay with a waist rhythm moving to come-here-I’m-already-going. The latter
boast of being the only queer band in Memphis, have an EP entitled “Like Us on
Facebook” (2012) and a hilarious song about a transsexual who turns into a super-heroine,
“Gloria Ho”.

The philosophy behind these hardcore practices
is encapsulated in a text signed off by one E. Sebastian Snowflake, under the
title “Decadence, My Frenemy”. «Decadence may be a marvellous weapon against
the police that we have in our head. Anarchism and the spectre of the anarchist
have always overshadowed the authoritarians of the right and the left that
accuse them of being “decadent”. To them, we represent the corrupted, the
uncontrollable, sex, violence, perversion, moral decay. We could not be happier
with any of this.»

The writing, posted on the Net, purposefully
seeks to gather together the combat by the queer currents represented by Stirner
and Kropotkine: «Taking our lives as art, taking our tragedies to the stage, following
our dreams of excess and pleasure as personal and social acts, we are
recreating our very own selves. That is how we, queer decadent anarchists, struggle
against oppression. We are decadent because our sexuality is not organised
around reproduction, and inclusively the reproduction of identities and
relationships of power that the racist and imperialist hetero-patriarch needs. In
decadence, queer anarchism is simultaneously individualist and communist. We
are destructive and creative. We are as if St. Sebastian, beautiful and martyrs
at our own orgiastic deaths, brought down by the arrows that pierce our flesh.»

This black-and-red Snowflake further emphasises:
«I aspire to a war movement capable of theorising the decadence of this
horrible society and building places of pleasure that terrorise the dominant class
with our ferocity and our humour. And how to ensure that revolutionary decadence
does not get recovered by the system as happened to the LGBT front? We approach
the collapse, rupture, perceiving how things only really become of interest
when they are collapsing.»

This is, and continues to remain, the “core” of punk
rebellion with the difference that it has lost the typically macho and
misogynous tone of the originalpunk, replacing it with a pink punk. So much the
worst, the better in a tactic of increasingly mirroring reality and exponentially
raising chaos. Only in the context of a hecatomb are we able to organise
pockets of liberty and equality, the first cells (wishful thinking) of a
society built on foundations formed by free individuals and with multiple
orientations in their means of interacting with each other. Not by chance, this
proves the slogan hoisted by the duo Butch Vs Femme: Kimberli Aparicio and
Chavez d’Augustine resolved to set to music their discussions on gender
identity and the differences between butches
(masculinised lesbians) and femmes (feminised
lesbians). Their activities seemed to have come to a close in 2008 but they
were back causing damage in 2014 because they think the campaign has yet to end.
Is it really or is the revolutionary program of Snowflake but some fantastic
delirium? Will the revolution not be swallowed by the black hole as with all of
the rest? «There’s no future for us», as the song has already sung.

quinta-feira, 14 de dezembro de 2017

Chili Com Carne is looking for foreigner publishers for the following book: "a" maiúsculo com círculo à volta- or is you prefer: Caps "a" with circle around. It's a book about music and anarchy written by renowed music critic Rui Eduardo Paes (or REP, his friendly acronym) and illustrated by various Chili Com Carne artists: Joana Pires, Marcos Farrajota, André Coelho, Jucifer, Bráulio Amado (also Designer of the book),José Feitor, David Campos, Daniel Lopes, André Lemos, João Chambeland Ana Menezes.Often, and in a few cases if not abusively, Punk is identified with Anarchism. In another music areas, there's the usual analogies of the so-called "free-improvisation" with libertarian principles, even if some of the players are musicians with political and social perspectives influenced by Marxist currents such as the Trotzkism and Maoism. There are more connections between music and Anarchy that meets the eye and that's what this short book of Rui Eduardo Paes will reveal... In it, REP lists the music of norwadays like jazz, improvisation, pop-rock, noise or experimental electronics. Daniel Carter, Lê Quan Ninh, John Cage, Fela Kuti, Frank Zappa, Thom York (Radiohead) and Nicolas Collins are some of the figures portrayed by his analytical writing with philosophical dimension, often with humor and provocative thoughts has this essayist and editor of the online magazine jazz.pt is known for. Among the topics covered throughout the ten chapters widely illustrated are the occult, spirituality, science, science fiction, technology, love and sex, with reference to authors as Robert Anton Wilson, Hakim Bey, Murray Bookchin, Starhawk and Ursula K. Le Guin.

About the author: Rui Eduardo Paes is a rare example of something rare: a journalist whose work is as essential and informative as it is well-researched and passionate. - Dan Warburton (Wire, Paris Transatlantic)

Music critic and writer free-lancer. Chief-editor of the jazz and improvised music online magazine JAZZ.PT, after six years of editions in paper. Artistic director of the festival Jazz no Parque, produced by Serralves Foundation. Author of nine books about music mixed with multimedia, politics and queer theory. Collaborative work with Culturgest and the recording labels Clean Feed and Shhpuma. Co-founder, with Carlos "Zíngaro", of the artists association Granular, and member of its direction for 11 years, until 2013. Co-founder of the Ernesto de Sousa Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation / Luso-American Foundation / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and member of its permanent jury for 20 years, until the last edition in 2013. Former assessor of the ACARTE Service / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's board of directors.

This is the first chapter, "Gilles Deleuze and the posining of Beethoven", translated in English:We are experiencing interesting times in the
history of anarchist thinking. The avant-garde in this field has gained the
designation of Post-Anarchism due to having internalised contemporary critical reflections
such as those proposed by philosophers in the post-structuralist school, in
particular Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.

At a time when Anarchy no longer needs to be adverse
to the divine, when we may encounter a flourishing Christian anarchist movement,
defending the return to a savage state, and an anarchist Paganism, with
incursions into Shamanism and ritual recourse to narcotic substances, these “new
persons” (as the Russian Nihilists of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries first got identified with the term surviving to identify their
intellectual descendants) have delighted in the discovery of occultism and all
its speculative potentials.

There is thus the clear pleasure that Christian
Kerslake found in one of the first texts written by Deleuze, published in 1946,
when the author was just 21 years of age. This represents the preface to an obscure
book written by a physician and occultist in the Romantic period, of whom we
today hear so little reference, one Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, an Austrian
of Italian origins.

“Mathesis: Studies on Anarchy and the Hierarchy
of Knowledge” provides the title to this introduction, immediately leading to
the suspicion of something other than a prior anarchist influence on the French
philosopher. While the term mathesis
universalis was advanced by the rationalist Descartes in order to designate
a science capable of explaining everything, we may nevertheless be certain that
its justifications prove platonic, theological and esoteric and it was within
this scope that Malfatti applied the term.

What the author wrote and what Deleuze himself
considered of “Mathesis” in this prose illuminates many aspects of his later
work Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Félix Guattari, such as the essay Difference
and Repetition and the concept of a «body without organs».

The fact remains that Gilles Deleuze would
never again mention Malfatti irrespective of applying the idea of mathesis in his essays on numerous
different occasions. Furthermore, he did not authorise the republishing of any
of the writings from his youth and a motive explaining the surprise of Kerslake.
Those had remained safeguarded from the majority of readers.

Indeed, Malfatti ended up playing an important role
in the secret societies of European occultism of the 19th century, among
the Martinists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Illuminati and Theosophists. As
a physician, he was a follower of the methods advocated by John Brown: all the therapies
involved the administration of drugs such as opium, arsenic, camphor, wine or cinchona
from Peru. It was not then rare to find, in the General Hospital of Vienna,
patients in extremely advanced states of drunkenness, stumbling along the
corridors or lying, prostrate in their beds…

Previously a theologian, Brown turned towards medicine
after having cured the gout he suffered from through the consumption of opium. He
put into practice with his patients the theory that the human organism functions
through a combination of external and internal stimuli with the symptoms of any
disease caused by imbalances in them. Recourse to opium simultaneously
functioned as a stimulant and a relaxant for the excitability of the body.

For somebody with a contemporary perspective, this
might appear strange. However, we need to take into account how two centuries
ago psychotropic substances were perceived as the best of panaceas and
commercially freely available and subject to prescription…

Not even the circumstances of their patients
dying along the way, whether through the lack of any more effective cure or
through an overdose, demotivated Brown and Malfatti from using those drugs and,
as the chronicles testify, both displayed behaviours typical to drug addicts. Indeed,
still furthermore, the latter became the clinic of preference for princes and
the bourgeois. And also by artists: his name is now best recognised as the
physician to the composer Ludwig van Beethoven than for any of his other
activities. Still better: as the physician who killed Beethoven.

However, we shall get there soon enough… For
the meanwhile, we need to be aware that the understanding prevailing in that
period was very different to that kind of moral judgement we might hand down
today. According to Schelling, the father of the then emerging natürphilosophie and also an inveterate smoker of Chinese pipes,
Brown «was the first to understand the uniquely genuine principles of all the
theories of organic nature». For example, those of «somnambulism» and «animal magnetism»,
which official medicine would later let fall by the wayside.

The «artificial fireworks» adopted by Malfatti to
stimulate the «bodies without organs» has experienced the longevity that we
know and encountered other defenders in philosophies of more recent influence,
such as the psychedelics Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, both, to a greater
or lesser extent influenced by the anarchist movements and, hence, by Romantic occultism.
Gilles Deleuze counts himself as among those radical thinkers that engaged in
experiments with drugs and thus joining a list that stretches back to the
post-Marxist Walter Benjamin and the anarchist Ernst Jünger in the final years of his life.

The orientalism of Leary and McKenna in the years
between the 1960s and the 1980s was already present in Malfatti over the course
of the years between 1790 and 1800, plunging into Hindu mysticism like few
other of his contemporaries and from which he derived the notion of a «hidden anatomy»
ordered according to polarities, powers and plans. Mathematical factors but from
an incredibly old, stretching back millennia, metaphysical mathematics.

The name Malfatti would prove the delight of
the hirsute bearded nihilists in their intentionally dirty clothing who, later,
would not rule out any means to assassinate the czar of proud Russia. In every
language, such is translatable as «Bad Deed» or «Badly Intentioned». Much gets
discussed around what really did happen. Might the enlightened doctor have
planned the death of Beethoven by poisoning, raising the dosage of arsenic in
the potions he would prepare him? Might this not have been a simple accident even
if foreseeable with such a dangerous medication? Might it even have been the composer
himself who exaggerated in the quantities ingested?

What nevertheless remains certain is that mathesis took the life of Beethoven. He,
at least so it would seem, was not actually infirm; he did however need some
kind of stimulation in order to compose and this was the role played by the occultist
physician. Arsenic contains aphrodisiac properties and these, when turned away
from the act of sex, thus when sublimated or “transcendentalised”, generate a
recognised creative potential. Beethoven was stimulated up to a level of absolute
non-excitability. In a certainway, he was symbolically deposed from his
conditions of genius.

The great irony to this story, which has Gilles
Deleuze as its mediator, stems from how another great name in music, the Zen anarchist
John Cage, sustained his entire musical theory on the negation of Beethoven. His
affirmation that the latter «was wrong» has become proverbial. And he was
wrong, in his opinion, because Beethoven defined sections of a composition by
harmonic means and Cage not only spurned any relevance to harmony but also had
a personal incapacity to deal with it.

Knowing the affinities between Post-Anarchism and
science fiction as well as the fantastic literature of writers like William
Burroughs, we have here all of the ingredients to imagine how Malfatti de
Montereggio was mandated by a Deleuze turned time traveller through magical
means, on the occasion of his death in 1995, to exterminate the person responsible
for the authoritarianism of harmony in music, Beethoven. Consider how this
would have made feasible the existence of a Satie, of a Webern and, of course,
the inventor of the prepared piano…

The secret imposed by the post-structuralist
thinker as regards his intellectual interconnections with the Italian born pre-nihilist
of Vienna might, in this context, be interpreted as indicating complicity in a crime.
It now remains to identify just who was the brains behind this Anarcho-esotericism
driven conspiracy. Hakim Bey? For all of the consequences that we might wish to
draw from this, the most mediatic of post-anarchists does have a criminal
record. He is a publicly assumed paedophile.